Cement and Concrete. Prolegomena to a material culture in post-war Ticino

Isabel Haupt, Lorenzo Roberto Pini

Dieser Artikel beruht auf einem Vortrag, der beim Symposium «Baukulturen der Boomjahre» am 15.06.2023 an der FHNW in Muttenz gehalten wurde. Alle Beiträge finden Sie im Online-Tagungsband.

The post-war building cultures of Ticino are closely inter-related to the use of cement and concrete. In 1967, compared to the rest of Switzerland, the canton consumed one and a half times more cement per capita, a rate also the highest of all across Europe.[1] The strength of the local economy was closely dependent on that of the construction sector, the only one in which Ticino outperformed the national average.[2]

Towards the end of World War II a number of large dams were constructed in concrete (fig.1). Then, during the boom of the post-war period, the use of exposed cement materials for buildings, but also for infrastructures like the N2 motorway with its architectural design by Rino Tami exploded.[3] As early as 1975 with the exhibition Tendencies – Recent Architecture in Ticino, curated by Martin Steinmann, the scope and quality of these new architectural works captured international attention.[4] When the Ticino Tourist Board invented the slogan «Ticino terra d’artisti» in 1984, the new self-confidence found its expression in the famous poster designed by Orio Galli, that combined the 15th-century fresco of the church of Santo Stefano in Miglieglia with the Casa Rotonda in Stabio built by Mario Botta in 1981 with BKS bricks, a cement-based building product made in Ticino.[5] The diffusion of the building culture into everyday culture shows a series in the Eco of Locarno of 1990 which presented region by region buildings worth seeing, among them many made of BKS bricks or of exposed concrete, which has become the qualifiying material of the Ticino ‹School› (fig. 2). The success of this architecture – as remarked Nicola Navone – «would suggest specific characteristics inherent to reinforced concrete construction in the canton Ticino, the history of which remains to be written»[6].

Material culture

This invitation to study the material culture of cement and concrete in post-war Ticino was taken up by a research group based at the Institute of Materials and Construction (IMC) of the University of Applied Arts and Sciences of Southern Switzerland (SUPSI).[7] We choose to focus on the years between 1945–1990. Even though construction activity did not really take off until the 1950s, the end of the World War II is the obvious turning point for an examination of the post-war period, which allows to better understand the change from a war economy to the construction boom and the corresponding effects on the use of cement and concrete. At the opposite end, the years 1989/1990 are aligned with the revision of SIA standards for reinforced concrete structures and the near-definitive end of the Swiss cement cartel.[8] The classical questions – Who? What? When? Where? How? Why? And today? – can be grouped into research fields as the use of materials, the history of materials, important players, transfer of knowledge, the construction site and the test of time. Focusing on the use of materials and not on the architectural design for example, the question of the ‹who› will put into the spotlight not only architects, engineers and clients, but also the producer of building materials and building contractors, some of whom have very interesting company archives that have not yet been systematically evaluated.

Silipol and the Central Park Building in Lugano (1969–1978)

A first ‹deep drilling› to understand what kind of material can be found in company archives was undertaken in the archive of the Consortium Central Park in Lugano.[9] The documents of the time were thoroughly discussed with the actors who took part in the construction, especially with the site manager Eugenio Foglia.[10]

The Consortium Central Park was founded in 1970 by Eligio Boni and Renato Regazzoni, Luigi Giussani and the Immobiliare Park SA to realize a large building complex in Lugano, the Central Park. Central Park was designed by the well-known architect Peppo Brivio after Rino Tami had submitted a first project, which was considered too rigid. The project started in 1969 and the building was completed in 1978. The construction of this new residential and commercial complex which occupies an area of 10,300 square meters was a landmark operation in the Lugano of the 1970s (fig. 3). Above a two-storey base with commercial use rise three towers of nine-storey buildings with apartments. The flexible layout with a pillar structure, a regular module of 7.20 m in both directions, allowed to create transverse apartments, suitable for an international clientele, in which the living area overlooks the lake (fig. 4). But the architecture is as well characterized by the shape of the volumes that offers a skillful interplay of solids and voids and by the materialization of the facades.

For the curtain wall prefabricated slabs made of a durable cement-based material called Silipol®, produced by the Fulget company in Bergamo (Italy), were used in 1974 for the first time in Switzerland.[11] These slabs have been much publicized in Italian architectural magazines like Domus. Franco Albini and Franca Helg used them for the cladding of the Rinascente store in Rome (1957-61) and the Milan underground, opened in 1964. Probably through these projects they attracted the attention of Eligio Boni from the construction company Boni and Regazzoni who pointed them out to Peppo Brivio. One reason may have been that Silipol® made it possible to differentiate the large building structure by color using a tested product. An anecdote reports that the colors had been chosen by the clients and the architect one early morning out on a boat on the lake at sunrise, aiming to create harmony of Central Park Building with the context.[12] Brivio proposed four basic colors: white for the ground floor and a dominant color for every block: grey, ochre and pink. In addition, the slabs made from a mixture of marble powder and freshly moistened cement and hammered by hand after drying, imitate natural stone and thus convey a certain elegance. About 10,000 pieces have been produced for the complex, mainly vertical cladding slabs, but also pieces of external furniture like benches and floors (fig. 5).The recipe for the colored slabs is still preserved by the building administration.

The construction of Central Park Building and the use of Silipol® reflect not only the cooperation between the various players, but also the cultural and material transfer between Italy and Ticino. The subtly colored slabs are evidence of the interest in artificially colored building materials in the 1970s, which can also be seen in the BKS bricks, for example at the Casa Bianchi in Ligornetto, constructed by Mario Botta in 1976 (see fig. 2). And last but not least: The use of the Silipol® slabs shows that research into Ticino’s post-war material culture, with a focus on cement and concrete, has many a surprising discovery in store beyond the familiar examples.

[1] Giovanni Buzzi, Paola Pronini Medici (eds.), Il cementificio nel parco. Storia della Saceba e della riqualifica territoriale realizzata dopo la sua chiusura, Bellinzona 2012. p. 116.

[2] Alexander Grass, Grenzland Tessin, Zürich 2023. p. 31.

[3] The N2 highway is one of the already very well researched objects: Ilaria Giannetti, Structure and architecture in dialogue: design micronarratives of the N2 motorway (1961–86), in C. Fivet, P. D’Acunto, et al. (eds.), Proceedings of fib Symposium on the Conceptual Design of Structures (Attisholz Areal, 16-18 September 2021), Fédération International du Béton, 2021, pp. 417-424; Ilaria Giannetti, The construction history of the N2 motorway: networking on reinforced concrete in the Canton of Ticino, in J. Mascarenhas-Mateus J., A.P. Pires (eds.), Proceedings of the 7th International Congress on Construction History (7ICCH 2021), vol. II, CRC Press/ Balkema, Leiden 2021, pp. 590-597; Ilaria Giannetti, The N2 Chiasso–Saint Gotthard Motorway: Design and Construction of One Hundred and Forty-Three Kilometres of Reinforced Concrete, in: Salvatore Aprea, Nicola Navone, Laurent Stalder (eds.), Concrete in Switzerland. Histories from the Recent Past. Lausanne 2021. pp. 63–76.

Notes

[4] Martin Steinmann, Thomas Boga (eds.), Tendenzen. Neuere Architektur im Tessin. Dokumentation zur Ausstellung an der ETH Zürich. Zürich 1975.

[5] URL: https://www.ticino.ch/en/about-us/ett-storico/anni-80/terra-d-artisti.html (24.1.2024); Paolo Fumagalli, Attilio Panzeri, BKS. Architettura in Ticino / Architektur im Tessin / Architecture au Tessin. Bellinzona 1986; Ivo Trümpy , BKS Architettura e Tecnica. Lugano 1992.

[6] Nicola Navone, «In our country, it is practically impossible not to build in concrete.» Brief Notes on Exposed Reinforced Concrete in the Architecture of Ticino, in: Salvatore Aprea , Nicola Navone, Laurent Stalder (eds.), Concrete in Switzerland. Histories from the Recent Past. Lausanne 2021. p. 143.

[7] A working group based at the Scuola universitaria professionale della Svizzera italiana SUPSI developed a proposal for a research project in 2023 whose objectives and methodological approach were presented for discussion for the first time at the conference Baukulturen der Boomjahre on 15th June 2023 at the Fachhochschule Nordwestschweiz FHNW. Members of the working group are Marta Caroselli, Giacinta Jean, Irene Matteini, Cristina Mosca, Lorenzo Pini and Isabel Haupt (Büro für Architekturgeschichte & Denkmalpflege, Zürich).

[8] Georges Spicher, Hugo Marfurt, Nicolas Stoll, Ohne Zement geht nichts: Geschichte der schweizerischen Zementindustrie. Zürich 2013. pp. 257–262; Aurelio Muttoni, Between Constraint and Freedom to Innovate: Swiss standars to Innovate, in: Salvatore Aprea, Nicola Navone, Laurent Stalder (eds.), Concrete in Switzerland. Histories from the Recent Past. Lausanne 2021. pp. 53–62;

[9] The following informations are based on the material of the Archivio del Consorzio Central Park in Lugano and the Fondo Peppo Brivio at the Fondazione Archivi Architetti Ticinesi (FAAT) in Bellinzona. For a more detailed research on Central Park see Giacinta Jean, Cristina Mosca, Lorenzo R. Pini, Central Park in Lugano. A massive construction between prefabrication and craftmanship, in Proceedings of the 8th International Congress on Construction History, Zurich, 2024 (in print).

[10] Interviews with Eugenio Foglia, Alberto Donelli and Gianpiero Donati, by Giacinta Jean, Cristina Mosca and Lorenzo R. Pini, Date: June–November 2023.

[11] We thank Isabella Mariotti from Mariotti-Fulget s.r.l. for the information on the use of Silipol® in Switzerland (E-Mail, 25th May 2023): Other examples for the use of Silipol®, also for pavements, are the Permanent Mission of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea to the United Nations Office and other international organizations in Geneva (order in 1977), the headquarter of Daco SA in Geneva (order in 1978) and the pavement of the Migros supermarket in Huttwil (order in 1979). For Silipol® see also Maria Luisa Barelli, Tutti i tipi di marmi, leganti di ogni colore, permettono infinite combinazioni, in: Maria Luisa Barelli, Mauro Volpiano, Valentina Burgassi (eds.), Produrre per costruire, Giornate Internazionali di Studi del Centro di Ricerca Construction History Group, Politecnico di Torino, Dipartimento di Architettura e Design DAD, 15–17 febbraio 2023, 40. URL: https://www.dad.polito.it/news/allegato/(idnews)/19284/(ord)/0/(idc) (4.11.2023)

[12] Interview with Eugenio Foglia by Giacinta Jean, Cristina Mosca and Lorenzo R. Pini, Date: 6th April 2023.